One thing rednecks love to do: eat. It's an old tradition, eating good filling meals with friends and a liberal dose of beer or other lubricants added. Unfortunately, a lot of rednecks have lost touch with the tradition of the pig roast and the fish fry, a great excuse to cook (destructively, as fire is often involved and sometimes not in a good way) some really good food and shoot the bull with your friends.

Both these great redneck traditions require one thing above all: a reasonably safe place to do the cooking and the gathering, preferably not close to anything flammable you treasure like your house. And to do it right, you'll need space for two different fires: a bonfire that everyone can sit around and use to dispose of their trash, and a cooking fire off to the side. This means the best place to set up is generally in a woods clearing, and you don't want to do it during a dry season.

Inviting people is the easiest part. Call a few friends and tell them to bring a few friends who can also bring a few friends - preferably female friends. It should be a BYOB affair, as you don't want to pay for all that beer and you also don't want the people who show up just for the free booze.

Set your bonfire and cookfire up the night before. If there are some good-size logs in the vicinity, pull them up; people will come and sit on them. Scout around to get an idea of parking issues, and if you're not familiar with the area do a quick check for things like snakes and other pesky critters that could interfere with your redneck party.

If you're doing a pig roast, you need to either butcher and clean a pig yourself or get someone to do it for you. Because the modern redneck tends to be a little more squeamish than his forefathers, you'll probably want to do the latter. Make sure there's some way to rig a suspension right next to (not over) the fire so you can roast the pig. Tradition dictates that you wrap the carcass in barb wire and set it up between two trees very close to the fire, and you need to be sure someone can turn the roast with a stick so it cooks fairly evenly. It will roast for hours. For safety's sake, get a meat thermometer and make sure it gets to 185 degrees all over. Local barbecue sauce is optional.

There are plenty of options besides the barb-wire technique. A Cajun microwave is an in-ground metal oven; you put the pig in with any seasonings, bury the box up to the lip, put the lid on, and build a fire on top. A lot of people are using injections too, where they take whiskey or marinades and inject them into the meatiest parts of the roast every couple of hours. And then there are the optional side dishes.

Fish fries are, surprisingly, easier and start out more fun. Catch a mess of fish, and clean and chill them. You'll need a big cooler to keep them in while you're preparing them. Your cooking tools in this case are a turkey deep frier (available in most outdoor stores and nearly everywhere at Thanksgiving), about 20 gallons of peanut oil, and enough of a ½ corn meal/ ½ flour / salt and pepper breading mix to cover all your fish. Rinse the fish, dip them in the breading, and drop them into hot oil to cook. They're done when they float to the top, and you can drain them redneck style by laying them out on a sturdy screen. Bring along plenty of buns and tartar sauce.

Trade off cooking duties with friends, and spend the day hanging out, listening to country music, chatting with your friends, and eating some of your tasty concoctions. Ideally, everyone should be able to park where bumpers and tailgates make handy seats, and you definitely want to encourage the talented rednecks in your group to bring along guitars to sing some good country music. The only other thing you're likely to need: plenty of ice for chilling the beer that will show up.

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